Iranian Woman Stoning

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani – Iranian Woman Stoning – All I can say is stone the ungrateful bitch – She deserves everything she gets. Why try and help these idiots at all? It basically shows how born stupid these lot are. What is she expecting – some kind of mercy?

An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery says she will sue two German journalists who have been jailed in Iran for interviewing her son.

“I have told Sajjad (her son)… to sue the ones who have disgraced me and the country,” Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani told reporters in the northwestern city of Tabriz where she was tried.

She named those she wants to sue as “the two Germans”, her former lawyer Mohammad Mostafaie, Germany-based anti-stoning campaigner Mina Ahadi and her husband’s convicted murderer Issa Taheri.

“I have a complaint against them,” she told foreign media based in Iran at a conference organised by judiciary officials at a guesthouse belonging to a government welfare organisation.

The two German journalists from Bild am Sonntag were arrested on October 10 in Tabriz for interviewing Ashtiani’s son and family lawyer who were also taken into custody.

Iran says the two entered the country on tourist visas and failed to obtain the necessary accreditation for journalists from the authorities before “posing as reporters” when they contacted her family.

“I have come in front of the cameras at my own will to talk to the world,” said the woman who has been jailed since 2006.

“I am willing to talk because many people exploited (the case) and said I have been tortured, which is a lie,” she said, speaking in Persian with a thick accent of the Azeri tongue of the northwestern region from which she hails.

“Leave my case alone. Why do you disgrace me?” she asked at the brief conference where reporters were not allowed to ask question.

Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, was sentenced to death by two different courts in Tabriz in separate trials in 2006.

Her sentence to hang for her involvement in the murder of her husband was commuted to a 10-year jail term by an appeals court in 2007.

But a second sentence to death by stoning on charges of adultery levelled over several relationships, notably with the man convicted of her husband’s murder, was upheld by another appeals court the same year.

Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was joined by her children on Saturday, did not make any pleas for clemency but her son Sajjad Ghaderzadeh pleaded for her execution to be stayed.

“My mother has been sentenced to stoning … I want her death sentence to be dropped. This is my request,” Ghaderzadeh, who was himself released on bail on December 12, told reporters.

He said he hoped the sentence would be stayed as Iran’s former judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi had backed the suspension of such sentences.

Ghaderzadeh said he made his mother’s case “controversial” in order to save her but acknowledged that the plan had backfired.

“I thought if the case becomes controversial, she would be freed. But it did not happen,” the bearded youngster said.

“I planned this myself and searched on the Internet and found Mina Ahadi who introduced me to Mostafaie,” he said, referring to a Germany-based activist who has championed his mother’s case.

Mostafaie, who was the first lawyer of Mohammadi Ashtiani, has now left Iran. Ahadi raised the alarm in November over what she said was Mohammadi Ashtiani’s imminent execution. Ghaderzadeh criticised Mostafaie, the two German journalists and the second lawyer Javid Houtan Kian, who too is in custody, saying the group had “worsened” his mother’s case.

“He (Mostafaie) charged 20 million rials ($A2000) and then escaped without even meeting me or my mother,” Ghaderzadeh said, disputing the lawyer’s remarks that his father was a drug addict and used to force Mohammadi Ashtiani into prostitution.

“What Mostafaie recently said that my father was a drug addict is a lie. He has made this up,” said Ghaderzadeh, accusing the lawyer of using the case to seek asylum outside Iran. He said he had made a “mistake” in talking to the German journalists.

Ghaderzadeh also criticised Taheri and said it was “desperation” in the initial days that made his family grant clemency to his mother’s lover, which led to his release. “The question is why is Taheri free?,” the youngster said.

“He misused our desperation at that time to get our approval, but I will get Issa even if I have to study law.” Under the Iranian penal code, a murder victim’s family can offer clemency to the convict. Iran’s English-language Press TV aired footage of Mohammadi Ashtiani last month in what it said was a re-enactment of the murder of her husband.

The report also included interviews with Mohammadi Ashtiani, her son Sajjad and lawyer Houtan Kian, and accused Ahadi of seeking to politicise the case in the Western media with the aim of undermining the Islamic republic.